Bryan Caplan

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Bryan Caplan (born 1971) is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He received his B.S. in economics from University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D. from Princeton University. A great deal of his professional work has been devoted to the philosophies of libertarianism and free-market capitalism. He has published in notable journals such as American Economic Review, Public Choice, and the Journal of Law and Economics, among others. He is a blogger at EconLog along with Arnold Kling, and occasionally has been a guest blogger at Marginal Revolution with two of his colleagues at George Mason, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.

Currently, his primary research interest is public economics. He has criticized the assumptions of rational voters that form the basis of public choice theory, but generally agrees with their conclusions based on his own model of "rational irrationality." Caplan's book on this theme, The Myth of the Rational Voter (Princeton University Press 2007), was inspired by and is a response to the arguments put forward by economist Donald Wittman in his The Myth of Democratic Failure.

While an economist by trade, Caplan has cultivated a life-long interest in philosophy and once considered becoming an academic philosopher. He has been heavily influenced by Ayn Rand, Thomas Szasz, and Thomas Reid. He is an atheist.

Caplan is also well known for his criticisms of the Austrian school of economics. While he once considered himself an economist in the Austrian tradition, he has since rejected Austrian "praxeological" methods in favor of neoclassical methods. According to Caplan, "While the substantive contributions of Austrian economists to economics are significant, their sum from Human Action on is small compared to the progress that neoclassical economics has made over the same time period."[1] While some Austrian economists have disagreed with his criticisms, many have praised him as one of their more knowledgeable and interesting critics, and he has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, published by the Mises Institute.

Caplan has also been a critic of the economics profession in general, on the grounds that a large portion of economic research is devoted to issues which are minute or uninteresting, concentrating more on mathematical methods than genuine academic inquiry. He considers behavioral economics to be one of the more important fields in the profession. He contributes to and administrates an "Armchair Economics" e-mail list for discussion of economic phenomena in everyday life, named after a book by Steven Landsburg.

He maintains an extensive website where viewers can access his academic work, an assortment of unpublished essays, and a variety of exhibits. Of note, the site includes a "Museum of Communism" section, in which he analyzes Marxist ideology and gives overviews of Communist atrocities in the 20th century. Also of note on his website is an "Anarchist Theory FAQ" which has met with criticism amongst social anarchists, provoking responses including Appendix 1.1 of "An Anarchist FAQ". He was recently featured in a warning to college students issued by the Center for American Progress

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